CALIFORNIA HOLDING BACK ITS YOUNG

There’s a nasty California disease spreading so fast that even our baseball teams have caught it.

Last year, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim kept their best player, then-20-year-old Mike Trout, in the minor leagues for the first month of the Major League Baseball season. This year, the L.A. Dodgers held down their most talented player, 21-year-old Yasiel Puig, for the first two months. Both teams felt their player was too young and needed more seasoning, and both teams paid a heavy price. The Angels fell into a deep hole from which they could never quite recover, and the Dodgers, without Puig, fell into last place. (After Puig was brought to the majors, they quickly climbed into first).

But don’t be too hard on the Angels or Dodgers. In California, delaying the progress of ambitious young people has become standard operating procedure.

A bachelor’s degree used to be a four-year project. Now, thanks to generations of cuts in funding and course offerings, Californians compare university graduation rates at a six-year standard. At the entry level of education, we’ve helped balance the budget in recent years by progressively raising the minimum age for starting kindergarten.

Young people used to buy homes. Now, especially in the more populous coastal cities, high prices force couples to wait years longer than the average in other states. This is one reason why California’s homeownership rate, 54.5 percent, badly lags the national rate of 65 percent.

Launching a business takes months (or even years) instead of weeks thanks to labyrinthine California regulations and local permitting. And on hiring, California faces a double whammy of delay: a comparatively high unemployment rate and a high number of unfilled jobs. To put it another way, young people can’t find work, which means they can’t get experience and skills, which means the jobs employers wish to fill lack qualified candidates.

California’s budget system squeezes the universities and favors debt over new investment. Our tax system famously requires new homeowners and businesses to pay more in property taxes than their established counterparts. And we subsidize the old, lavishly and unapologetically. Even if the old are felons. One reason our prisons are so overcrowded and cost so much is that prisoners are kept inside until they are old and require extensive medical care.

Californians love to debate whether we’re driving billionaires out of the state. But the wealthiest Californians are actually the demographic most likely to stick around. We should worry about people who are more likely to leave the state: college students who can’t find a spot in our public universities and young families who can’t afford a home.

California’s elite ought to embrace an agenda focused on how to do better by the young and hungry people who represent the state’s future. How do we reduce the costs of high-quality housing and education? How do we make it easier and faster to start a business?

But such a futuristic outlook isn’t a natural fit for a state political elite that is extraordinarily long in the tooth. Governor Jerry Brown and U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer are in their 70s; Dianne Feinstein, at 80, is the oldest current member of the U.S. Senate. Antonio Villaraigosa, whose future is speculated about as though he were a young, up-and-coming politician, is 60. Even our youngsters, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, 45, and Attorney General Kamala Harris, 48, will soon be old enough to join AARP.